Other Side of Glass
by teh tarik
Summary: (Fred is dead and I am George. George is gone and I am Fred. Forge George. Dead Fred.) The twins have been separated. Bereft of each other, George has to come to terms with the reality of life by himself, and for Fred, death is not the end. They might just meet again.
1. dust

**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling, not me.

* * *

**Story: **Other Side of Glass

**Author: **teh tarik

**Summary**: The twins have been separated. Bereft of each other, George has to come to terms with the reality of life by himself, and for Fred, death is far form the end. They might just meet again

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**Part 1**

**i. dust**

**.**

I didn't see any of it because of the dust. That's what I told everyone who asked. (George, George what happened?)

I didn't see when Rookwood's spell cracked open the passageway and dug the stone out of the walls and ceiling, when a bolt of green light planted itself into the square of my brother's chest. When he took a half-step back, when his lower jaw came loose and opened his mouth into a sort of astonished hole, the flop of his arms, wand slipping through the slots of dark space between his fingers. When his eyes (my eyes) glassed over in some sort of dream we might have shared in the past.

The sick slow-mo of the wall, pouring over him with its brokenness, its crushing pieces. He did not see any of it (he was dead by then). He'd already taken a hit to the heart. The wall was nothing.

Ask someone else. I wasn't there. I couldn't have seen. Ron, Percy, Harry, Hermione – they saw. They were there.

I'd got split up from Fred. It was the screaming, the knife-streaks of spells. It was the dust. I was on the faraway end of the hallway. It was the wrong end so I didn't catch him when he fell. Because if I had he might not have died. In that split second before the pupils of his eyes went dark and flat, I might have clapped my palm over his mouth – I might have forced that last breath back in.

.

.

They laid him in the Great Hall with the other bodies. I knelt by his head. Mum was sobbing a wet patch into his chest. I thought of putting a hand through her hair and winding a thick strand of it round my palm and pulling until her face peeled away from his body. I thought of shaking Fred's wrists free of Ron and Ginny who were clasping them. I wanted his hands to myself. His slack fingers, the jut of his elbow. All the rest of him.

The others soon pulled themselves away and went back to the war. I stayed as long as I could and then Dad put a hand on my shoulder and said, "C'mon, we need you."

My legs got up by themselves and walked me out. Hogwarts was all torn up. I stumbled corridor to corridor, as good as useless. Maybe I'd hit a few Death Eaters on the way, I don't remember. Someone's spell slugged me in the stomach and I was thrown against a wall and my head might have caught the stone and I lay for awhile on the floor seeing red stars with long thin spokes pinholing my eyeballs.

"Jesus Fred, you all right?" Lee Jordan was crouching beside me. He looked like a ghost, his dreadlocks covered in dust. He couldn't tell! And we'd been mates for years.

I thought of saying "George" and then wave at the left side of my head where my ear used to be but my throat was bone dry, and the chuffing syllable of my name sat like a fat slug on my tongue.

"You hear me?" Lee tried again. "Fred."

A thought came to me. Maybe I could be Fred. After all we're identical. We have the same body, the same laugh. We're as good as the same, interchangeable. So I shut my eyes for a second, and when I opened them again, they weren't mine anymore. They were Fred's. I lugged myself up with Fred's arms and back and shoulders. I opened Fred's mouth, peeled his stuck voice like adhesive tape out of my throat.

"I'm OK."

"We'd best get you to Madam Pomfrey. She'll have something for your head."

I ran a hand through my hair. It was damp. Lee kept on talking. "It was Yaxley. Bastard shot a Stunner at you but I got him right back."

A red streak of light shaved past my cheek. Lee grasped my arm above the elbow and hauled me onto my feet. "We gotta move."

I was still wearing Fred's body. His knees shook but they held me up and jolted me along. I peered out of his skull, felt my way along with his hands.

"Jordan, is that you? Who's that with you?" Someone's voice cut through the smoke. A figure was edging along the sharp rubble piles toward us, wand raised.

"It's me," Lee called back. "And it's just Fred with me. He's been hit in the head. Who're you?"

The person stepped right in front of us. It was Percy. He looked tired. His robes were singed, his glasses broken, and there was a cut like a hairline crack on his face, tracing his jawbone.

"Fred is dead," he said to Lee. He gestured dully at me. "That's George."

"Fuck. No. I can't believe this – " Lee's voice tapered off.

Those words Percy had uttered. _Fred is dead_. They stripped his body away from me. (Fred is dead and I am George. George is gone and I am Fred. Forge George. Dead Fred.)

Every part of him I'd tricked myself into wearing fell away and became mine again. My eyes and hands and legs. We shared nothing. I stood there, bald.

"Madam Pomfrey's in the Great Hall," Perce said. He helped Lee pull me along and I let them.

.

.

There was yet another hand on my shoulder. "George – it's over. We've won," someone said. At first I couldn't place whose voice it was, only knew it wasn't Fred's. Fred's voice was dead, congealing somewhere among the sticky threads of his lungs that refused to heave.

My body was aching. It was because Fred was in my arms. My elbow held his head and shoulders and his back was slung over my knees. His legs trailed across the floor beyond my reach. His forehead, pressed to mine. The smell of him – dried sweat in his hair, the sting of blood in my nostrils – or was that my own? I couldn't tell. It didn't matter.

"Let's get you away from here," the person behind me said. It was Bill. "You need a rest."

As if by some reflex, I dug my fingers into Fred, into the hollows around his shoulder blades, and pushed my knees into the stone floor, fixing us together and to the ground. Bill tried to pull me up. Dad and Charlie shuffled forward to help.

"George, let go of him now. You can't do anything."

There was a sort of ridiculous tug-of-war match as all three of them tried to shift Fred away from me and get me up on my feet at the same time. But they couldn't move us. We were a dead weight. (I imagined his body jerking with mock shock, blackened indented eyes rolling at my bad pun.)

In the end it was Ginny who knelt beside me – I could hear the tears in her voice. They were an ugly sort of tears – the kind that leak down your face in shapeless trails and some of them slide off the backs of your eyeballs and down your throat, choking you.

"Let me help you hold him," she said.

And so I did. I made way for her and she rested her head on my arm and slowly she picked off my fingers one by one from Fred's back. Together we laid him down and I stood up and everything clouded over for an instant. I must've had been sitting on the floor for a long time with my limbs all bunched up and taut.

.*.

.

I remember that we won the war. Voldemort was out-duelled by Harry and the surviving Death Eaters rounded up and we reached the end, apparently. There are blanks in my mind. At certain moments memory drops away into black trenches and I can't look into them. But I remember there was a great flush of noise rolling up from the depths of the castle, peaking as it reached the Entrance Hall and bursting out the doors into the rising morning. Laughter. I can hear it still. It is such an odd sound.


	2. fred

**Note / Disclaimer: **Fred's POV. All chapters with his POV will be unnumbered (and will just be titled 'fred') because linear time means nothing to poor dead Fred. I am experimenting a little with form, tense shifts and all. Hence the big gaps at the end and the weird beginning! Pardon! But it's fun - we should all try it once! Does anybody know how to insert extra line breaks / spaces between paragraphs without inserting those horrid fullstops? Please help!

I don't own any of the characters; J.K. Rowling does.

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**fred**

**.**

**.**

If you knew what happened –

No. Scratch that.

Something has happened.

What happened was –

No.

Now how do I tell you this. How do I tell you that

(I am here)

(I am still here)

(I am here in brackets)

_But what do I know_.

.

*.

How about this.

Let me collect for you everything that I _do _know.

(It will all come back to me eventually)

*.

.

George and I never really talked about death. We didn't have to. We weren't too keen to have an early one. But sometimes there'd be moments when we'd be skating along that line, trying not to cross over, hanging on to the underhanded edge of lightness. We'd laugh. We would blow over death like a breeze. Death and the Ministry could go suck each other's faces for all we cared.

We wanted to live – we wanted to live for as long as we could. We meant to grow into tottering old men with long waist-length beards like Dumbledore's, which we'd loop and knot round our robes like sashes. We would've pretended to be deaf and used our wands to dig out earwax ("Yeah, we'll probably fry our brains by mistake," George said) while prodding a couple of Dungbombs under someone's (probably Percy's) chair. And of course when it came to the actual matter of death we'd have to do it together.

At least that was how our discussion (if you can call it that) went shortly after the time Toadface Umbridge confiscated our broomsticks and banned us from the Gryffindor Quidditch team. George and I were mad for awhile (banned for life!) – we were pacing the school corridors letting loose as many spells as we could, channelling all our displeasure into chaos.

Mostly, we were jinxing suits of armour into swinging about their swords and axes, hacking at each other's breastplates and lopping off helms. There was quite a lot of clanging; it was as though church bells had taken to the school passageways. Soon enough, the sounds of Filch's howling and Mrs. Norris's shrilling rose from the floor below.

(During our time in Hogwarts we had a seven-year action plan called the 'Aggravate Argus Filch Arrangement'.)

"PEEVES!" Filch yelled. When there was no answer, no sing-song smartarse reply from the poltergeist, he howled again (you could almost hear the froth simmering in his throat as he spat our surname out of his mouth), "BLOODY WEASLEY TWINS!"

"Fuck it, let's go," I said and we strode off, mischief partly managed. A scowl-y Slytherin fourth year crossed our paths and refused to make way so I hexed him. Black tentacles burst out of the kid's mouth and ears growing longer and thicker and lumpier, wrapping around his chest and waist and legs until his whole body resembled a boy-sized writhing knot. Some of the lumps swelled, splitting into charred, flesh-textured flowers dribbling an ink-coloured sludge from their centres.

OK, I admit I can go overboard sometimes. That was one of the many spells George and I had made up; this one was inspired by Professor Sprout's Venomous Tentacula. A crowd of students had begun to gather.

"Better no one try to burn it off Foxblott – that gunk is flammable," George said as we hurried off.

"C'mon," I said. "Let's go for a ride."

"Umbridge has our brooms," he reminded me.

A couple of third years – I think their names were Selvin Marshdale and Trixie Buckle – rounded the corner and walked straight into us. I grasped Marshdale's shoulders, steadying him. "Just the people we need," I said.

George caught onto me fast, like he always does. "Give us your brooms," he said to Trixie.

The pair of them looked uncertain.

"We'll give them back tomorrow," I said. "Plus complimentary Weasley joke products for the rest of the year."

They fetched their broomsticks for us fast enough.

We snuck out the Entrance Hall – it wasn't too close to bedtime but Her Honour the Hogwarts High Inquisitor, Dolores Trollface-Under-the-Bridge, had set up a new curfew – no students out of the castle after seven, all students in their dorms by eight, lights out by nine-thirty.

"Disobedience _will_ be met with discipline," Umbridge had announced sweetly one day over dinner as though her words were suds of pink lipstick, floating down the length of the Great Hall. "A month's detention with me as well as a five hundred House-point demerit for any student who breaks the curfew."

But you know me and George. Restrictions meant jack shit to us.

Outside, the night was quilt-thick. In the sky, a sickle-slice of moon looking as though it had swung off its axis, its two points like staples aimed down toward the Astronomy Tower. There was something in the air that felt like a challenge. Something that made the hairs at the back of my neck and on my arms and calves bristle with a livid static. My veins rising to the surface, the dark blood skimming against the skin, an inch away from the cold heavy night air. George could feel it too – I could tell by the way his strides morphed into almost ferocious bounds, taking him far ahead of me.

We made straight for the dark pitch, stopping at the shed where Madam Hooch kept all the quidditch practice gear to retrieve a pair of beater bats and as many bludgers as we could carry.

We released all the bludgers and they shot up into the sky before doubling back – all fourteen of them – and pelting down to where we stood, probably to clobber us one by one in a lethal hail.

I threw a leg over my broomstick (yet another listless Cleansweep) and kicked off, just missing one of the bludgers slamming the ground where I'd been in an explosion of dirt and grass. Behind me, George whooped.

"Perfect night for flying," he said. The wind shaved his voice to a whistle. I waved my bat about madly, scooping up the rushing air and pretending to throw it behind at George, who was being trailed by nearly the whole band of deathballs.

One of the bludgers came hurtling for my right ear. I screwed my back around, angled my arm and smashed it towards him.

"Another one for you, slowbones," I called back. He snorted and dodged, and whacked a different one straight at me.

I hit it right back. "This is like that crazy Muggle game Dad tried to teach us and Ron and Ginny when we were kids. Y'know, that one with those things called racquets or whatever."

"Tennis? Squash? Dad taught us a whole syllabus of rubbish."

"Well, s'ppose it can be either," I said, pulling the broom handle upward, trying to rise higher together with this thermal I'd ridden straight into. "Except Muggle sport is blimmin' slow. Suited for slugs like you, though."

He roared. "You asked for it!" and slammed three bludgers in lightning succession toward me.

I should've been able to handle them – but I'd ridden out of the warm column of air that had been gently lifting me up, and my broom dipped a little. The sudden movement, together with the jerk of my body as I rolled round to meet those deathballs threw me off balance. There was a wobble. I flung my arm out.

"Watch it!"

The bludger whacked my face in. Right at the bullseye of my nose. It hurt like you fucking won't believe it. As if that wasn't enough, another bludger caught me in the shoulder, and the third one – the last one George hit at me – jammed into my solar plexus.

I was off my broom. Spiralling downward. The rest of the world spun with me, like me, spun me. Shit.

"Oi! Oi!" George was yelling as he dove after me. Behind him, a wheezing train of deathballs.

He sped past me and ten metres before I hit the earth, pulled his broom right under my plummeting body – which of course meant that I broke my fall on him. He groaned. Swore. But his arm snagged my waist, moored me to him so I hung like a broken doll at his side. The broom didn't hold us both. We tumbled to the ground, a snarl of limbs. The side of my wrecked face stamped its imprint in the dirt.

I remember thinking, I don't really have to fade to black or anything since it's already night. And are those real stars in the sky or are they simply of the kind that whirl inside your skull after you hit your head?

George disentangled himself from me. "Oh, fuck."

The bloody cannonballs were still coming at us. I lay there useless. He drew his wand and swished it in a broad arc. The balls exploded in brilliant flashes of orange – fragments drifted down, still glowing like sparks. George knelt beside me.

A cloud blew over the moon. Pitch dark. "_Lumos_," he said. Light burst from his wand and he shone it down on my face.

I blinked – but even that hurt. My eyelashes were heavy with moisture. "Ow – turn it off!"

"Jesus. Your face is a nice piece of artwork."

"Thanks, mate," I rasped. "All your doing."

"Hey, I didn't know you'd use it as a bat." He raised his wand, pointed it at me. I grimaced and shut my eyes. "_Episkey_."

My bones jogged to life, began to migrate under my skin, reconfiguring the shattered structure of my face, ribs, dislocated shoulder. Skin sewed itself up. My nose jumped back into its old rigid shape. I sat up, a rawness in my body.

George grinned. "How you feeling now?"

"Perfect night for flying my arse," I said. "More like dying."

Something felt funny about the word. It seemed – apt. The word, the memory of the syllable hung in the air, refusing to disperse. Its weight settling on my chest. There weren't any stars after all. It felt like such an appropriate time for people to disappear and never be heard of again.

George stuck his wand handle-first into the ground, a ghostly band of light still shining from the tip. His head dropped onto my newly-healed shoulder. He sounded casual. "I guess that's a problem we avoided dealing with today."

"You kidding," I said mockingly, ruffling his hair (already tousled from the flying, the cut of it falling down the sides of his face, scratchy – now that I think of it). "I couldn't die without you. Death wouldn't be the same without my Georgie."

"Piss off," he slapped the back of my head. "Sounds like we'll have to make it a double act then."

"Yeah and there's got to be a blaze," I said.

"Our specialty fireworks are in the making."

"And a little something extra – ,"

"Portable Menagerie. It's a shade more upbeat than our Swamp..."

"Perfect. Don't forget we've got a responsibility to the wizarding world –"

"To leave behind a legacy of laughs –"

"Legend."

"We should stage this at the Ministry of Magic, fireworks and all. Seems chockfull of idiots these days," he said.

"Now that will be a statement."

I suppose we thought death as interchangeable with retirement for us. A double act, the last of the Wisecracking Weasley twins. And then we'd head off somewhere – George and I – alone. Or maybe we'd just hang around with the rest of the aging Weasley clan. Or whatever, y'know. We thought we could agree on things as we went along.

There we were, messing around, blowing bubbles of talk into the air, chewing bits of old gum we'd found in Georgie's robes. We were being what we thought were 'our good old selves'. But we weren't laughing. It didn't feel easy, that long moment that wouldn't stop, the darkness, time swaying unbroken in the gaps between us. It sort of unnerved me.

Of course we were stupid and idealistic. You can't really plan for death if you don't plan to die. That is why I'm here now, speaking to you, when I should have shut up long ago – full of unexpelled thoughts, wedged between consciousness and non-existence. None of our half-drafts of ideas ever materialised.

Instead, this is what really happened.

Hogwarts, May the 2nd, 1998. Evening. George and I, duelling a Death Eater. I forget who – it might've been Thorfin Rowle, may Wrackspurts crawl out his arse for the rest of his life. We were winning, obviously. Further down the hallway Perce had taken on Pius Thicknesse. I thought of going and helping him – after all Prodigal Perce had just come back to us, and I'd missed out on _years_ of teasing him. George must've sensed my feelings, because he said, "Go on. I can handle this one on my own."

"You make sure you catch up," I told him and ran forward.

I shot a hex at Thicknesse, one that would've turned all his hair into a nest of biting worms rooted to his scalp, if only I hadn't missed. "Hello, Perce!"

"Evening, Fred," Perce said with equal nonchalance. He hit Thicknesse with a particularly nasty curse. "Minister, did I mention I'm resigning?"

I laughed, then. Now I can tell you what was in that laugh. I have all the time in the world to look back at that moment, to cut it gently out of its context and strip off its layers, to understand everything that had built up to that laugh. There was elation. Excitement. Relief maybe. A sense that something had been resolved. The Weasleys have been put back together, y'know? And Percy had made a joke, of course (a bad one).

But then there was that noise – that crack and the ceiling and the walls started coming off in chunks. I'm faster than a bunch of falling rocks but something else hit me. Green. A terrific blow to the chest

.

.

.

(nothing was holding me up)

.

.

.

and there was light.

I was filling up with light and it was rupturing out of me. That split second it took for me to die was the longest – the slow detaching of consciousness from flesh, thoughts and memories (which were which?) unhooking one at a time and wafting away

.

into

.

space

.

my eyes going brighter and brighter – I had long stopped seeing – and at last all the sounds of the war and the world went out of my ear as well.

_George_, I thought.

I died in a laugh. Cackling like I'd made a joke but I hadn't, really. An idiot's death, ignorant, unexpected. I died in a fucking punchline.

.

.

**tbc**


	3. to grieve

**Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling**

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**ii. to grieve**

**.**

The Burrow is a mess when we get back. Death Eaters or Snatchers or whoever had broken in and blasted apart the place out of pure spite I suppose, and the floor is littered with our things –furniture, photo frames, mirrors, crockery – all shattered, turned inside out, missing chunks. We troop into the kitchen in silence and Mum loses it; she spins round and orders us out, says there's a lot to be done and she won't have us all in here, clogging up space and obstructing her. She gets to work at once. There's a strange look of relief on her face as she pins up her hair and fixes her mouth into a grim dash and begins picking up the scraps of our house and sticking them together as best as they will fit. The Burrow is the family shell.

The others get round to setting up a temporary place in the front yard for Fred's body. I don't help them. They'll have a casket for Fred. (Fred-in-a-box). Percy or Bill might Charm the ground so blue and white and yellow but mostly white flowers push up and soak their scent into the air. I will not go in there.

But it doesn't make a difference. I don't stop seeing Fred. It's hard because I've got his face and he has my stare and our eyes are going all over the place tracking the hint of each other. We try to avoid glass a lot. It's where he skims along like a glance, like a glint - pure light and no human shape but I know it's him, it's us.

Once, I passed a window and something moved on the surface and before I knew it I'd got my wand out and popped the glass. It was an accident, so I Transfigured all the shards into a pile of dead leaves. No one saw me. I'd gone for a walk after that. I walked until my feet broke through the ground and I found myself on the marshy banks of the stream, mud sucking my shoes in. There was nothing in my head.

.

.

On the morning of Fred's funeral I wake in my old bedroom, suspended in a sort of horror. I don't quite remember falling asleep or even going to bed. There's something about the room – the two beds, the two small desks, the two sets of shelves – the two-ness of everything.

When Fred and I were still living here we never took boundaries seriously. I threw all my things on Fred's shelf and bed and he dumped his rubbish on mine. Many nights I fell asleep on his mud-spattered quidditch robes, his soggy towels, his dog-eared books. In the mornings we'd grab whatever things nearest to us and go. It got to a point where we couldn't tell our toothbrushes apart. We lived in a state of overlap – our room a bloody mess, a blotch of things, mismatched pairs, strewn over the place. The only times we were marked apart was when we wore our Christmas jumpers with our initials embroidered on them. But those we swapped so many times over that nothing made a difference anyway.

Now the place is tidy. Mum cleaned it out when we left and all the sharp lines and edges of the room became visible. The furniture in their conspicuousness look like stiff bones of themselves. I think I need to get the hell out, but downstairs – everyone else is downstairs. They'll be preparing for the thing, the occasion. Mum will have cooked up a massive breakfast. She'll be trying to shove half of it down my throat. It's quiet – god, it's so quiet. I can hear my heart. I can feel it beating thickly; it feels like a stone sitting on top of my ribcage.

I look out the window. God. They're arranging chairs into shabby ranks, all the mismatched seats of the house and others borrowed from the neighbours – armchairs, sofas, three-legged stools, even a deckchair. They'll be putting up a sort of platform next, maybe with a podium. The casket with him in it will be brought out. We might get down to burying it later. It's all a joke.

I push the window open. "Oi!" I say, "Stop."

Down below Harry looks up from the moth-eaten chaise longue he's been lugging across the lawn. "What?" he says. His voice is vague.

I slam the window shut. What am I doing? My pulse has now gone up to my head; it is slow, deliberate. Shut up, shut up. There is a wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom. There might be something there, yes, yes. I fling open its doors, pull out the stacks of old laundered robes, mumble an incantation and the bottom falls through to reveal a hidden compartment with a stash of joke-product ingredients and supplies. Fred and I kept reserves here for whenever we came to visit the Burrow (ideas pop into place all the time).

Among the things are several parcels of brown paper with labels, a portable cauldron, vials of liverwort juice and animal venoms, a pound of Doxy eggs, the sandpapered thighbone of a Scrumpion, small flasks of various long-keeping potions – Polyjuice, Mild Sleeping Draughts, Wart-Growers and Boil-Blowers – and there, near the bottom, a tiny foil package. The label on it reads _Foliage of Grimblethistle – Crushed and Dried_. We'd started sourcing this particular ingredient for one of the newer products we'd been working on - Weasleys' Sickly Sweet Sentimentality Syrup (A Shot of Schmaltz for your Spirits!).

_Grimbly_, Fred called it. _Let's hit up the grimbly._

It might help. It might stop the beating in my head, at least for a little while. I reach for an empty vial and shake in the dried grimblethistle, which has been crushed so thoroughly that the leaves have become powdery. Fred and I did this occasionally in our flat at nights after work, and for hours we'd lie on bed or on the floor or wherever we happened to be, flaccid-jawed and spread-eagled and sometimes he'd spray one of our Starsquirt Cylinders (one blast to fill your room with permanent floating sparks!) and blue and gold light-shards would fizz and spit in the air, but mostly in the dark side of our eyeballs.

I tap my wand at the rim of the vial and a tiny flame appears inside, burning the leaves. Pushing on the stopper I wait for a minute before uncapping it again. A tendril of algae-green smoke unfurls from the vial and I put my nose to the rim and take it all in.

Instantly, thick clouds fill my head, mushrooming in my eyes, vision becoming a dull smudge before clearing a little. My head a bubble, about to detach and rise off my shoulders. And the smells - the smells of - of everything winding and colliding and tangling in my nose. The ingredients on the floor and on my lap - sharp, acrid odours mingling with the syrupy scent of pineberry and the frogwort extract and the sawdusty whiff of the Scrumpion bone - I can smell the sheets on the bed. The film of dust on the window ledge and downstairs the smell of food is overwhelming. I think I can smell colours as well. The scent of red - warm and silky. The light yellow of the walls, like butter.

But there's something else - a different scent. An old human residue. Familiarity. I pull myself up - my limbs have become bags of water attached to my torso – onto Fred's old bed. He hasn't slept in it for ages yet his scent is all of a sudden everywhere. I nose through his sheets like some sort of fucking animal. His pillow - and under it, there is something neatly folded. A jumper - red, plain except for the large letter F on the front of it. F. F. F. F for Fred. F for filibuster. Funeral. F for fuck. F for –

It's an old jumper, more than three Christmases old. Running my fingers over the wool, something dislodges from the loose threads. It's a hair, lying across my palm, a thin orange scratch.

I don't know what made me do it – it must've been that damned grimbly – but the next moment I'm rifling through the supplies again and reaching for that mini flask containing the aged Polyjuice Potion. I drop the hair into the sludge and the mixture loosens and becomes brick-coloured. Then I drink.

It is funny! I am going to my own funeral. I am not dead. Fred will be – no _I am proud of me_!

I put on his jumper. He'd grown out of it a long time ago and now it wraps round my chest in a tight but comforting band, pressing under my arms. The F is there and that is all that matters. Over the jumper I wear my formal robes and then I collect myself and go downstairs. I don't have to look into a mirror.

Mum has left some breakfast on the table. I nearly go mental with the whole perplexity of aromas. My head is a fog of colours. Everyone is outside. I drink a glass of water. The water slips down my throat, pure and silver. I drink another glass and another. And then I start on the food. The flavours explode on my tongue – the sticky runny yolk, the salty meat, the tomatoes prickling the insides of my mouth with their mild acid. The toast crackles and splinters between my teeth, the crumbs as sharp as grains of crystal.

The door opens and Mum comes in. She stops short when she sees me. "George!"

"Am starving, sorry," I say, full-mouthed. Bits of egg spray out.

Mum starts crying. She comes and hugs me from behind so suddenly that the back of my head bangs against her chest.

"Mmmph," is all I manage.

"We're going to get through this, George," she says, sobbing into my hair. Her voice wobbles with relief. She lets go and reaches for a dish and slaps four more slices of bacon onto my plate. The smell of grease is intoxicating. "Now, you eat up. It's getting late. We're going to be starting soon. You don't have to do anything. Just eat."

I've lost control of my facial muscles, and my mouth is hanging in a floppy line so it looks like I'm grinning. Mum wipes away her tears. She seems happier. But all I'm thinking about is the bacon.

.

.

During the service I keep tuning out. Time seems to go on forever but nobody notices. They're all sitting awkwardly on our ragtag chair collection, dabbing their eyes, fiddling at the hems of their robes and looking sombre. The sunlight is brilliant – I can see the particles of dust suspended in the air. Nobody moves their heads. It's as though they're all frozen.

"We are here to grieve – "

Now there's some bloke giving his best funeral voice. For a few minutes I listen to his every word and yet after he says each word I forget what they are. The scents of grass fill my nose. I want to feel the grass. I slide my foot out of my shoe and rub my sole against the ground; the blades of grass prick my skin and my toes curl and uncurl in a kind of senseless joy.

" – our brother Fred – "

That's Charlie's voice. He's hunched over the podium, unsmiling. I was supposed to have a turn and get up in front of everyone and recite some tear-jerking lines and maybe be in-character and crack a joke – at least that was what Dad suggested last night. I meant to say no but I couldn't even get my voice out. I just shook my head and when Dad pressed me a little I bit down on my lip and shook my head again stupidly. So I won't be talking. My tongue has swelled in my mouth; I run it between my teeth and it feels like a roll of rubber. I need a drink. At the same time I have this uncomfortable need to go to the loo. I'd drunk too much water earlier on. I keep shifting in my chair.

Next to me, Percy says, "What's the matter with you?"

Some of the dust in the air gets in my nose. I don't bother keeping the sneeze in, or softening it in any way. There's a kind of boom to that sneeze; it came all the way down from my lungs which are still vaguely rattling from the effort. People crane their necks to look at me.

"This isn't funny, George," Percy hisses again. "And wipe that smirk off your face."

But I can't. My face is still all slack even though I try to scowl a little. And the feeling of grass on my sole is so marvellous I don't think I want to even try to look grim. There's a light flavour of salt in the air and for one delirious moment I think I'm tasting everyone's tears.

In front of us all is the casket, closed. He's going to be buried a little distance from the house, round the back. There's a wide green space with trees and a stream and all.

Earlier, before the service started I'd remarked to Dad, "It's a swell place, actually. We should all be buried here. It could be our own family cemetery. You should suggest this to Muriel."

Ginny had smiled at least. But Percy said as usual, "This isn't funny."

This isn't funny.

It isn't.

So wipe that smirk off your face.

God, my bladder is going to be fucking smithereens any minute now. This isn't funny. I need to take a piss. And then that's all I can think of. Pisspissspiss. Need to.

" – and he'd always make us laugh, always. All the time. And, well, I suppose I'll miss that. We all will – "

Ron's voice distracts me a little. I look up and force myself to listen and make sense of his words. He talks, stumbling on and on about pranks and holes and missing people and laughing people and something about a teddy bear becoming a spider…

That is one bloody awful speech.

Instantly, there's silence. Ron stops talking, his mouth open, staring at me. So is everyone else. I think I must've said that aloud.

"What are you _doing_?"

I don't know. But I've already got up from my chair and I'm shambling up to the podium, elbowing Ron out of the way. My jaw won't click shut so I'm still grinning moronically.

"Hello," I say and my voice sounds slurry. Every single person's eyes are on me. So this is attention. This is how it _feels_. Every eye on me – they sparkle like wet stones, their hard scrutinising angles turning over every inch of my skin.

I say, "Actually there is no need for any of this."

Nobody answers.

I keep talking. "You know Fred. He's here right now. I'll show you."

And I lean forward and push the hair out of my face behind my ears – both my ears – I show them both my ears – grinning all the while. I loosen the front of my robes and they fall open and the red jumper shows. F for –

– but nobody finds it funny. Percy hisses, "Get. Him. Off." And immediately Ron, still at my side, grabs my arm and starts to haul me off the stage and Charlie jumps up from his seat and latches onto my other arm.

"C'mon, mate," Charlie says quietly, "This isn't good for you. Let's get you back inside."

"I'm fine, I'm fine."

But still they pull me into the house and into the kitchen and they force me to sit on the table because all the chairs have been moved out. The door bursts open behind us and Mum, Dad, Ginny, Lee, Harry and Hermione fall in.

"What's wrong with George?" Mum says, and there's a flutter in her voice. She grabs my face and angles it upward to meet her gaze. "His eyes are all bloodshot."

"He's lost it," Ron says. "He's gone mental."

"Maybe he's had a few drinks in secret," Lee says.

"What about everyone outside?" Charlie says.

"Bill and Percy will handle it," Dad says. "I don't think he's drunk. I'm not sure – "

"I have a bottle of Snap-out-of-it Sobriety Serum," Mum cuts in. "Right there in the cupboard above your head, Ginny. It should help restore him to his normal senses."

All their voices drift in my head, a cloudy chorus. It sounds pleasant. Mum, tipping a bottle of green liquid (it fizzles!) into a glass which she shoves under my nose, saying, "Drink it all up."

But it smells of plaster dust and the scent is so thick it jams up my airways and my eyes start to water.

"No."

"Charlie, Ron," Mum says and the two of them hold me still and force my head backwards and she pours the glass of serum into my mouth that won't shut and down my throat. The insides of my skull flare and tears start dripping down my cheeks. All the clouds in my head disperse and a wave of nausea climbs up from the pit of my stomach bringing with it my half-digested breakfast. Everyone jumps back from me. My robes are rank with vomit.

"Gross," Ginny says. "You feeling better now?"

"Water," I say and someone else chants, "Aguamenti" and pushes a glass into my hand. I drink and nearly spit everything out. The water feels starch-thick, oozing down my throat, vomit-tinged at the edges.

But I'm back to my old self. The pounding in my head starts up again. Everyone is gathered around me in an uneasy knot, their faces wrinkled from the smell.

Mum is near tears again. "Oh George, oh George," she repeats. I can't look at her. I am a fucking idiot. I say I'm sorry. They won't let me go back out.

"I'll stay with George," Lee says. "The rest of you better go back. We'll be OK."

And they do. When they're gone Lee says, "You'll be right, mate. We can go back after if you like."

I say no and leave him. I pull off my robes and the jumper and my shirt and run them under a hot tap until steam rises in clouds up to the ceiling, fogging up the bathroom mirror. I can't see myself but my hand goes up to the left side of my head, feeling for the cavity, that small dark curve in the flesh.

.

.* * *.

.

The grave is set in the shadow of a large tree by the stream, not too far from the house. The surface of it is covered with flowers; not the neat blue and white arrangements conjured up by Percy, but lurid orange flower-heads with pink spots, maroon lilies with peeling petals and thick brushes of stamens, engorged sunflowers. Ginny's handiwork.

"It's very Fred-like," she said.

There was a procession, Ginny told me, from where the service had been conducted to the grave. The casket, floating in the air and behind, a black trail of people, their wands held up. The earth that dug itself, the casket descending on its own.

But they're all gone now and Fred's been buried and I wasn't there to see. The headstone is a rigid tumour poking out of the ground, glistening in the late evening light. Words have been embossed onto its surface.

_in loving memory_

It's too dull, too understandable. Kneeling at the foot of the grave, I flick my wand. Pinpricks of light rise from the depths of the stone's black shine. They glint almost fiercely. They look like they're blooming and winking out into nothing and blooming again. They look like stars. They look like tiny frosty fireworks.

There are more words – his name, a set of dates, and near the bottom, in a slanting carved script:

_the last laugh is yours_

I wave my wand and all the words and numbers disappear except for his name. The specks of light remain.

In the air, I trace letters, and they appear on the surface of the stone, cut in roughly, skewed.

_jokes on you mate_

I wipe them out and try again.

_i mis –_

(mis – what? misplace? mishear?)

Again I scratch that out. The third time, I dig the words in deep, right under his name. Now the stone looks much better. Now it reads:

_FRED WEASLEY_

_**you owe me**_

I go right up to the headstone, crushing the flowers, and crouch before it. If Fred is indeed dead and buried here then I'm pretty much trampling on his grave, and my knees are now over his face. The thought cheers me up a little.

I bring my forehead down onto the top of the headstone and feel its cool edge press a line into my skin. All sensation drifts away from my body; the stone is the only thing that feels real and for a moment I can't help thinking my skull has become part of it, hardened into granite or obsidian or whatever it is. Something moves in my chest but I ignore it. _If there is a way._

If there is.


	4. ii fred

**A/N: Hi all! Things are a bit messy at the moment. Chapter 2 will be rewritten to make Fred's narration a bit more stylistically consistent, and then I'll be swapping Chapters 4 and 2 around. Many thanks if you've been following this story :)**

**The characters belong to J.K. Rowling.**

* * *

**fred**

I think

I think my eyes are open but I'm not sure. One thing I've figured out is that I can see with my eyes closed, and I can also see with them open. Thing is, there isn't a lot to see. What there is, is fog. A thick fog, scentless and without sensation. Swirls of it sweeping past, dirty white rags of fog. There's nothing else. It isn't damp. I notice this. At first I don't know why I'm all wired about the absence of damp, but then I remember this: fog, rolling over hills and over streams, sponging up the wet grass and the water until it was so heavy that I felt it sliding against my skin, a clammy touch. Behind me, a crooked house, layer stacked on layer, the sides refusing to line up, the chimneys all wonky.

I don't know where I'm at or how I got here or what happened before I got here.

It's not just the fog. I can't see myself. I'm completely invisible. I'm holding my hands up right in front of my eyes and I can't see them. I move my fingers and I feel them moving. I try looking down at myself but there's nothing to look at. So I don't have a body. Well, I do but I can't see it so in a sense I don't have it.

Something moves to my left. A silhouette in the mist coming closer. When it's near enough I see the red hair, the eyes, the shapeless mouth pricking into a smirk. I have a word, and I try to say it but it's a tough struggle forcing it off my tongue. The syllable is like a brush in my mouth, the bristles catching in the nooks between the teeth; the sound is sticky, pooling in my throat – treacle pudding, I remember treacle pudding, I ate it before and it smeared over my gums and glued my jaw together.

"George?" I say.

It feels like the first time I'm hearing my own voice. It's hard to recognise, even though I suppose, it's something of mine. It's dry, a whisper, a residue. The other person whom I just called George laughs. I don't know who George is, but something makes me take that name out of nowhere and pin it to the face of this person.

"George is your brother," he says. The skin all round his eyes is crinkling. "Funny isn't it? Most people would have a right old fright thinking they'd seen themselves. But you straightaway think of George."

I shrug. "You've lost me."

"You're been drifting. In and out in and out. But I don't think you remember, eh?"

"How am I – where is this place and why – " I wave my hand around " – is it so…foggy?"

When I talk the words leave my mouth in opaque tufts, like the mist all around me. Maybe the whole cloud I'm stuck in consists entirely of the scraps of words and the thin curling whispers of hundreds of voices trapped in air, talking non-stop in their entrapment.

"You're close," says the red-haired person who is not George. "But they're not just words. They're thoughts. Memories. Dreams. Everything half-conscious or more. And not all of them are yours, just like you're not the only one here. It's the soup of the subconscious. Something like that."

I peer at him, trying to get a sense of him. His hands are clasped behind his back and he's standing in a very formal way, with his face pushed forward, ahead of the rest of his body as though he's scrutinising something. The colours of his robes are shifting – maroon to green to black, spattering brief colour in the swirling grey. The outlines of his face are fuzzy, they're blurring, and the edges are breaking off into threads of white, wafting and winding away into the smoggy matrix. I have this unpleasant feeling that if I keep watching his face, it will peel away into smoke, shred by shred, right before my eyes.

"No, it doesn't really work that way," he says and he sounds so reassuring that it comes off as a bit condescending, "I can always come back anytime I like. I live here. In a sense."

"You didn't answer me. Where is this place and how did I end up here?"

"Why shouldn't you be here? You might have been here all along. Can you remember when you've not been here?"

I try to close my eyes but it doesn't do any good because my eyelids are transparent. I see through them, through my own bloody skin and it's more than a little creepy. Where was I before I realised I was here? I can't remember.

"You can start with your name. Surely you remember that, mate," he interrupts again.

I know my name. It comes back to me all of a sudden, a buzz in my ears, striking through my thoughts. I have difficulty saying it. I grind the word out from between my teeth. "F-Fred. I'm Fred."

"Well done. Bravo."

"Shh-ut. Up."

He looks at me, right where I'm standing. He can see me even as I can't see myself.

"I suppose that's my body you're having." I lift a finger and stab it toward him. It gives me a sense of direction. "Give it back."

He laughs. Throws his head back. Rolls his shoulders, stretches both arms, latches the fingers together and turns the palms to face upward into the non-existent sky. Wanker.

"Take it," he says lazily. "If you can."

I move toward him, as if I'm going to grab my body and find some long hole in the side and slot myself in, zip the skin up like it were a costume. I can't reach him. He floats out of reach. He exists just beyond my reach. He smirks. Half his face has already dissolved into the mist. There's a hole in his torso. The edges of him, of whatever remains are fraying like ruined cloth.

"Shit."

And then the half of his face which has melted reappears some distance away. An arm hangs in the air, a single leg, standing unsupported and supporting nothing. Body parts float in the fog as though someone has to come along and put them all together, reattach them with Permanent Sticking Charms.

"It's a lot easier than that. And yes, I can read your mind. Your thoughts are all over the place, anyway. Literally."

"Who are you?"

The hole in his torso grows larger, creeping outward, swallowing his flesh. Fog curls through the gap. "Gred and Forge, remember? You and George used to make up silly names. You remember? You better start to remember or you'll be stuck like this for a long time."

"Don't know what you're on about." I'm beginning to feel a little sleepy. Maybe if I shut my eyes for a minute, when I wake up I'll be somewhere else. This is all a dream.

"You're drifting again. Row, row, row your boat. Tell you what, I'll accept the name Forge. From Gred and Forge. It's a funny sort of name. F-f-f-forge. Forge of the Fog."

I ignore him. Bloody idiot's still not making sense. "What happened to me?" I say at last. "And what happened to George?"

"Nothing happened to George. It's you that all the bad stuff happened to."

I try to think back to the time when I wasn't awake in this foggy world. It's like thinking of sleep. It's like thinking of what being asleep feels like – not the dreams, just the sensation, the process of being asleep. I can't think of it. "Do _you_ even know what happened?"

"Course I do. I know what happened because _you_ know. You just don't know it yet."

"Are you going to get to the point or not?"

"Well, for starters, you died."

"_What_? Oh, you're funny."

He sighs in mock sorrow. The top corner of the remaining half of his face has vanished, and it looks like something bit a huge chunk out of his head. His solitary eye narrows and bulges, the eyebrow flicks up high into his forehead before settling slowly back down.

"You got Avada Kedavra-ed. Shot in the chest. Killed you instantly, or almost. Then a wall collapsed over you. Your body was quite badly broke."

"Well, shit."

"Smashed your mother's heart you did, dying like that, Fred."

So I have a family. There's not much left of them but I know George, he must have looked like me once, I think I remember that. Everyone else doesn't exist, not yet.

"Is _George_ the only thing you remember, then?" There is a taunt spiking his words.

And then I see something, a new image sailing right into my head. Not so much a single image as a tightly-wound coil of impressions, unsnarling with firebolt speed. And for a minute, the clarity blinds me. There's heat. Sand. I remember the feeling of sand scratching at the back of my throat, kernels of thirst.

"Are you remembering something?" Forge calls, but his voice is distant, breaking into pieces, the consonants falling apart and swallowed up by the writhing swirling world we're both in. "Be careful," he says again, and there's a curious singsong note swinging through his words.

The fog dissipates along with the Forge-fellow and his obscure jokes and I'm somewhere else, blinking in the sudden brightness of the day, sunbursts tingling at the backs of my eyes. The outskirts of my vision are flushed with orange. Sand piles up and falls into humps and valleys under the sun. In the distance, a wide blue river, and beyond that, a clay city, buildings like squat cakes. I turn around and in front of me, three massive structures – pyramids, their clumsy crooked planes needling at the very last inch into the sky.

A car winds past me. Its insides are crammed to splitting with a family of redheads. Something tugs at my thoughts and it occurs to me that I know these people. I race after the car. It's surprisingly easy to keep up with it, something is wrong with the car, it's moving so sluggishly, the wheels are a slow trickle on the road. There's so many of them seated inside – nine of them.

The car pulls to a halt in front of the largest pyramid and its occupants spill out. Their heads are an unnatural shade of red, and the wind rifles through their hair, turning their red wigs into flames. They're all in stripey kaftans and they seem to be laughing. I can't see them clearly no matter how hard I try. For some reason they're always at an angle even though I keep moving around. I try to circle around them to get a good look at their faces but it seems that _they_, or perhaps this strange dazzling world I'm in, are rotating along with my movements, so I can only see their side profiles. My perspective is frozen.

There's a mother and a father and six boys, two of them identical to each other, and a girl. It's the twins that get my attention. One of them is George and the other is me. I can say this firmly now because I _know_. But which one is which? Standing at a distance, at a stupidly fixed angle to them, I can't tell which one is me and which one is George.

They start to climb the stones of the pyramid. The blocks of stone are huge, some of them more than six feet high, yet these people scale them easily, even the girl who leaps up easily block to block, her arms swing her up, boneless and elastic – her name is coming back to me slowly – Gin gin strong as gin Ginny yes that's it Ginny. Ginny and George. I have two names – I pluck them out of the air and put them in my pocket, their sounds and syllables rattling in my head. I climb after them. It's easy. I feel light as nothing, although there's a strange weight in my head, the weight of two names jangling in my skull.

There is a triangular slit in the stone, and all of the family slide into it in single-file and are gulped into the darkness beyond. I hesitate at the entrance. The air is granular and a blast of wind throws more sand at me, pinging against my invisible skin. Invisible or not, it still stings. I can't stand this place. I go inside the pyramid.

.

.

I have been here before, in this dark musty place, in some other version of this place. There are long twisty passages – these I can't recall. There's no twinge of familiarity about them like there was when I saw the redhead family tumble out of the car or when I looked back at the sprawl of the square clay buildings across the river. The sun sets on this side of the water, this I remember.

The passages spiral through the dark, bracketed by rows of lamps haloed in sickly green. They don't give light so much as they draw in to themselves whatever residual light is in the air. I've been walking through long blank galleries, and along passages that split but somehow my feet know where to go, following the unseen trails of the other people, tracing the faintest vibrations of laughter in the air. At some of point, the path I'm taking becomes constricted, like a throat closing off to the air, sharp flinty stones jutting from the walls.

At the end of yet another gallery, there's a doorway cut into the stone. Light is slopping out of this doorway, pooling on the floor. I step through into a large airy chamber. I'm no longer in a pyramid – that or the pyramid's top has been cut clean off because above my head is the sky and a round white sun and a wind eddying the sand into gritty vortices. In the centre of the chamber is a large stone block, a sarcophagus. All the people are there, the red ones. Seated round the sarcophagus expectantly. Their faces still elude me.

The twins elbow each other. A tall thin older boy throws up his hands in a mock gesture of exasperation.

The mother comes bustling into view, a large tray in her hands. "Dinner's ready, dears," she sings.

She sets the tray down and everyone perks up and reaches out to grab the contents. I try my voice for them to hear, maybe they'll hear, maybe they'll know me. Maybe the one who is supposed to be me will recognise _me_ even if I don't recognise him yet.

I call out hello. There's a faint stirring in the air but they don't pay attention. I call out again. Can you hear me, I say, I'm looking right at you, I'm here. Again they ignore me. I walk toward one of the twins, reaching out a hand and grasping his shoulder, shaking it, saying OI. I'm talking here, I know you can hear me.

His shoulder is soft – softer than flesh, like beaten leather. Dragonleather, boots made of worn dragonleather, left out in the rain for too long that the material had sucked up all the damp and became sponge. There were laces on the boots made from the coarser hairs of a Kneazle. The flank of the left boot was charred. I don't know why I can remember the boots. Something else: the boots were hanging on a line of washing, their laces looping over the line and tied into a knot. Next to it was the washing, thin sheets swelling in the wind. The mother, coming out from a back door of some kitchen, wand in hand, shouting about _clean washing_ and _filthy boots_.

The boy whose shoulder I've got in my hand shrugs hard, trying to shake me off without turning round to face me. I grip him harder, my fingers squelching into the sponginess of his shoulder. Everything is wrong. The textures, the voices, the colours (his hair is so red it sears my retinas, it's the red when you close your eyelids against the midday sun but the light turns your membranes into glowing coals).

He starts to turn then, slowly. They all start to turn. I'm going to look them full in their faces for the first time. Maybe I'll know more about them, remember more. I look at them and swallow.

"Hey," I can hear my voice speaking as though it owns itself, floating out of me unchecked, "Who stole all your faces?"

Indeed all their faces are gone and the fronts of their heads have nothing but flesh smoothed over, no apertures for nostrils or mouths or eyes, just soft bumps for noses and dents for eyelids pulled down and sealed into their cheeks and skin as bald as eggs. How the fuck they've been talking and laughing without lips to frame the words and let the sounds out I can't even begin to think. But they're silent now. Silent as they all turn their (non-existent) faces to me in some sort of sick ridicule, saying in their unanimous blankness, _well? is this what you want? _

The mother is all of a sudden standing next to me. She reaches out and fastens her fingers around my wrist. I look at her hand and it looks as though it's gripping a column of air since my wrist is still invisible. So unfair that I can't see myself as I am now, while these people, these bodies with mannequin heads attached to their unaligned necks who don't even have eyes to see, can see me.

She pulls me down to sit at their sarcophagus-table. They pass me some of the food from the tray in the centre. It isn't anything edible, just a pile of sharp rocks.

"Go on, dear," the mother pipes in and I turn to her but her face is still vacant and mouthless. "You need to eat."

So I sit down with the whole bunch of them. I count them all again. I have five brothers and a sister. I look for myself. I look for George. They both turn their faceless faces to me and one of them gives me a thumbs-up. Next to me, one of my brothers I suppose – he's sort of shorter and bulkier than the rest – pushes something in front of me.

"Here you go mate," he says.

It's one of the stones from the tray. All of them are turned to me as if expecting something. I don't know what they want.

"Eat your dinner, dear."

For some reason, I put the stone in my mouth and bite down – I don't know why; it must be her voice, how compelling it is, how the inflections tug at the nerves in my body. There is pain puncturing through the roof of my mouth as I bite on the stone and its knifelike angles, lacerating my tongue. I know I'm meant to swallow it like a bezoar. But the thought of it slashing its way through my gullet the thought of it – the pain – the – I spit the stone out. Fluid dribbles from the corners of my mouth. I suppose it must be blood, only I can't see it because my blood is bloody invisible as well.

I want to get out. Help me out. I'm thinking please Merlin God whatever the fuck.

It works somehow – maybe I have some mote of control over this nightmare, I don't know – and slowly, everything around me, people and all if you could call them people, begins to melt into a haze of colour, which begins to bleach and blur. Tendrils of fog twine around my ankles, rising to my knees, up to the level of my eyes and until I'm completely submerged again in The Wasteland, that indecisive hell of a place.

"Ouch, it wasn't a good one, then." And _he_ is back as well.

"What happened to them?"

"Questions, questions, questions." Forge yawns. This time he's intact, though his sides are still smudging slightly. His robes are a dazzling scarlet. "Hey, look at this," he says, drawing his wand out from his robes and sticking two thirds of it up his nose.

"What the fuck…"

He smirks, the damned stick still poking out his nostril. "Come on, you used to do this all the time. Frightened your little sister, pretending the wand had shot a spell right through your skull and blasted your brain to bits. I see you remember her name, now."

"How do I get out of here?"

"Where would you go?"

"Where is there to go?"

"I can't answer what you don't know."

I grit my teeth. Wave my useless hands about as if that will clear anything up. Turn on my heel and walk far as I can. Outrun all these vapours. Outrun everything. The world seems to spin. I'm face to face with him again, the prick. He can read my thoughts, and he's grinning when I look at him. I look down at my feet again. Hold up my arms in front of my eyes. Still nothing. I'm clear as glass. So this is what life after death is.

.

.


End file.
